There are emotional benefits to getting older, one of which seems to be we become happier as we age.

A new study suggests a person's overall mental health, including his mood; ability to handle stress and sense of well-being keeps improving up until a person dies. It found a clear relationship between age and mental health. In other words, the older people got, the happier they felt.

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A recent survey of more than 1,500 San Diego residents aged 21 to 99 found people in their 90s were the most content while those in their 20s were the most stressed out and depressed. It also revealed this feeling of contentment remained true in midlife and didn't decrease at the end of life.

 "The consistency was really striking," said Dilip Jeste, director of the University of California San Diego Center for Healthy Aging and senior author of the study. "People who were in older life were happier, more satisfied, less depressed, had less anxiety and less perceived stress than younger respondents."

People's goals and reasoning change as they come to appreciate their mortality and recognize that their time on Earth is finite, explained Laura Carstensen, director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, who was not involved in the work.

"When people face endings, they tend to shift from goals about exploration and expanding horizons to ones about savoring relationships and focusing on meaningful activities," she said.

"When you focus on emotionally meaningful goals, life gets better, you feel better, and the negative emotions become less frequent and more fleeting when they occur."

The authors of the new study also suggest improved mental health in old age could be due to the wisdom people acquire as they grow older.

"As we get older, we make better social decisions because we are more experienced, and that's where wisdom comes into play," said Jeste.

He defined wisdom as a multi-component personality trait that includes empathy, compassion, self-knowledge, openness to new ideas, decisiveness, emotional regulation and doing things for others rather than for yourself.

The results were published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Tagsolder, happier, Age, University of California San Diego Center for Healthy Aging, Dilip Jeste, Laura Carstensen